by Ru Freeman
The wait is impossibly long for those of us who have already traveled far to get to this station, and, after all this time, we still have to wait for an hour and a half before our train leaves. By that time Loku Duwa has vomited once, Chooti Duwa has had to go to the bathroom in the station twice, and my son has flashed his money three times, responding to the relentless vendors who ply their wares among the weary and the bored:
“Kadalai! Kadalai! Kadalai!” mostly for Loku Duwa, who loves roasted chickpeas or roasted anything, really.
“Annasi! Annasi! Annasi!” mostly for Chooti Duwa, who has eaten pineapples only in round slices, not in huge quarters like this.
“Ice palam! Ice palam! Ice palam!” for all of us to cool down, but especially for the little one, whose tongue is on fire from the spices on her pineapple. The children enjoy that last purchase the most, the sight of those cardboard triangular cylinders nestled in the rigiform box, the sudden cooling of the air near their knees when the vendor sets his box down and opens it, the taste of those sweet, cold blocks of flavored Elephant House ice.
I try to be patient with them and content, to enjoy the time between one life and another. I bring up the past so I may leave it behind, to take myself adequately into the future.
It wasn’t because of the drinking that I went with Siri, though that was enough of an excuse. It was simply because he was young and I was too and he asked repeatedly. Isn’t that, in the end, why any woman does anything with any man? He was a choice and he was mine to make. Of course I would choose him. What woman wouldn’t? He was young and present and he had eyes that looked for me.
Siri looked for me at market when I went to meet my husband as he came off the largest boat, standing on the prow in front of his crew of men like he owned the ocean itself, broad-shouldered and square like a lump of sod, brutal and arrogant. He even looked for me when I went with my children to watch them play with the waves. He watched me when I went to the well at dawn those times when there was a water-cut and that was our only source, and he watched me when I went to temple on full-moon days. In the end I found that all I was doing was watching him watching me, and then it was not clear who had begun this game in the first place.
But more than his pursuit was the fact that he had turned away from his father’s fishing trade, and that made him everything my husband was not. Other women doubled their prayers when their husbands went out to sea by the light of the moon, but I, I sang. I sang because Siri was not among those men whose boats blinked on and off on the horizon heavy with their nets and gathered on the shore in the morning to pull the mā-dal in, hand over fist. He stayed with me, beside me, inside me, and I did not care that my children were asleep, alone at home, or that the neighbors might come to know. He burned the fear out of me until all that was left was desire. And I took it wherever I could, whenever I could, not caring anymore what anybody thought or said or might do. Siri was like his name to me, happiness. And I, who had never known happiness as a woman, why would I say no to that?
It filled me with hope that, when he went to work, it was to a clean-kept Muslim store frequented by the students who came back to this town from the universities in Colombo and Peradeniya. He didn’t earn much there, bringing plain tea and godhamba rôti stuffed with curries cooked with too much pepper to his customers, but he learned about matters that had nothing to do with the sea from the students who knew what was going on all over the country. That’s where he learned about the leader of a movement who paid attention to everybody, even the lower castes, who was so intelligent he had been offered a scholarship to study medicine in the Soviet Union, and who had returned home to lead the people in revolution. He told me that this leader had united young people from everywhere—from the universities, from the unemployed, even from the military forces!
I was proud that my Siri was going to join such a man, and that he was going to help bring our lady prime minister back into power. I was proud that the leader of our movement came from my father’s town, the place where I, too, had been born. How could Siri and I have known what would happen after the elections, how our Mathiniya would turn her back on us, how she would put his leader in prison, how the people would rise in revolt, and how they would die as the army returned to her fold? All those young people, felled in groups, falling headfirst into shallow graves.
“Biso, my Menike, someday I will be in a good position with a new government,” he told me. “My campus friends have assured me of this.” Dreaming with me, the sand beneath us, the skies above, and only the sound of the waves to argue against the things he told me, my husband out at sea. I believed in that future the way he did, unable to imagine that we would be wrong, unable to know that when Siri was gone that future would mean nothing to me.
Siri started to meet his university friends by the boats late at night, and too often, though that was dangerous: there were always informants, there in our South, where the plans were being drawn; the police were everywhere, and they could never be trusted, even when they claimed to be with us. I used to go there sometimes, against Siri’s wishes, bringing a flask of tea as an excuse or a treat I had made with the money from the sale of the small, leftover fish my husband had no use for. I wanted to put myself in harm’s way, to join them in taunting something corrupt and deadly so that my other imprudence would pale and somehow escape the notice of the gods, that Siri and I would be safe.
One of Siri’s friends was a Buddhist monk, his saffron robes thrown on without care, quite unlike the priests at our local temple. Revatha Sādhu looked as though he might catch on fire himself at any moment; he was energetic and restless and moved too fast for me to imagine that he had done anything meditative in his life. I recall the thrill I felt in my spine to be in the presence of a priest without the requirement of devoutness. It was heretical, that behavior, but once we had dispensed with the usual taboos, what more was there to do or be but worse? Worse than could have been thought of me, worse than I could have imagined of myself.
They were young, even the priest, and they had opinions about everything, things I had never considered before. I listened as they shouted at one another, as they fought, and announced truces, and loved one another with a fierceness I had never seen among men. Even the sādhu, roaring right alongside them, the future almost here, their plans for things I didn’t quite understand laid out, nearly complete. They didn’t treat Siri differently. He was one of them. That’s how he moved in their midst, contributing his thoughts, cajoling them to stop smoking or drinking, advising them about some absent girlfriend or other. I was fascinated. I sat beside him and was content to be there, like him, learning, absorbing, hiding from my real life.
But then, in one night, four of them disappeared. My Siri and three of his friends, Thilak, Priyantha, and Gamini. I think those were their names. Or maybe it wasn’t them. Maybe it was some other boys, some boys whose names I hadn’t caught. When Siri returned to me, limping, bleeding, all of them stopped coming to the boats and went into hiding. He grew quiet about his hopes after that. He loitered on the beach whenever he could, hoping one or another would show up, but they did not. There was only the sea, and the sea betrayed us. The sea brought a body to shore.
“Menike,” Siri called to me that morning. Menike. Lady. The other half of my given name. “Menike, come down to the boats.”
“Tonight? He’s home tonight. I can’t come,” I said. I had just returned home after leaving my children at school—my son at the Rahula Vidyalaya and my daughter at the girls’ school, St. Mary’s Convent, where I had begged the nuns to take her without payment, persuading them by dint of my mother’s education and my own association with the convent in Hambantota.
“Our sādhu’s body has come to shore, bloated and full of holes.”
I did not need to know more. I was familiar with the sensation of futures ending, of hopes dissolving like the froth of the waves. And because he called me, because I went to comfort him, to comfort myself, risking everything, with my hus
band at home to notice my leaving, to follow me, because of this, my Siri died, with a knife in his back, his life easing out of his body into me. If he could have chosen an end, I know this would have been the way for him. In my arms, beside those boats he would not step into, on that soft sand, not far from where his friends had once stood with him, convinced of success. And I am grateful, still, despite all of it, that I had one year in which I got to be a woman. Not a daughter, not a wife, not a mother.
News of his murder spread through the neighborhood like the cholera that came and went in faraway places, or the droughts we heard about on our radios. Siri’s body was dragged and left in our front yard, and his parents came, weeping, to collect their dead son to the sound of curses from my husband’s drunken mouth, the whole neighborhood watching, relishing my punishment. And even though they knew, his parents knew, nobody would accuse my husband. It must have been easier for them, too, to believe their son had died at the hands of the police, whom everybody despised, and for a cause that was more noble, grander, more lasting, in their minds, than love for another man’s wife.
And now I remember how my husband looked this morning when I left him. How I stood and watched the rise and fall of his body, the breath leaving and entering him. I looked at him, but it was Siri I saw. The way the breath left his lips in a whistle when I walked by, so soft that only I could hear; the way the breath left his lips when we stood together in the dark; the way the breath came out of his body, all of it, leaving him behind, and me, never to return on that last night.
The train lurches forward without preamble, jerking me out of my mixed-up reverie with its passions and losses and hopelessness and pride. As we crawl sluggishly out of the station, comfortable in our relatively empty carriage, the rain begins. It looks dreary outside.
“I am glad we are not staying in Colombo,” Chooti Duwa says, pronouncing the word with aplomb, now that she knows what it means.
“Good. You will like the hills.”
“How big are they?”
“They are not hills, they are mountains,” her brother tells her, warming to his role as the deliverer of information. “We learned about them at school. It’s where all the tea in the country comes from, and the land is so good that the vegetables are bigger than any you’ve ever seen. And there are waterfalls.”
“What are waterfalls?”
“Waterfalls are when the water in a lake is falling down from one high mountain to a smaller mountain,” Loku Duwa says, trying to restore some balance to the usually shared role of knowledgeable older siblings. She has always managed to sound older than her years. It’s the curse of the oldest girl in the family, I suppose. And a blessing, too, for me, for any mother, for how can one woman take all the responsibility for a family? No, there must be help, and I am glad for my older girl. I take her hand in mine and hold it. She has small hands and her fingers are short, like her father’s. She is small, too, with lots of soft flesh to keep her small bones safe, not good for manual labor. Siri’s daughter, on the other hand, is like him and me: lean and strong and somehow, even at this age, peculiarly capable. I take her hand in mine too and compare my girls, tracing the lines on their palms as if I were like one of the Tamil fortune-tellers from Kataragama who pass through town, their dark green and orange cotton saris tight around them, their mouths red with betel stains, their nose rings and their baskets of potions and papyrus and twine balanced on their heads, always grateful for plain tea.
“Will the water fall on our heads if we stand under it?” Chooti Duwa asks, a baby again.
I smile. “The water in the mountains is very cold, not like the ocean. You can bathe in it, but you have to get used to it, and unless it is a very small waterfall, you don’t stand right underneath it. You stand in the pool at the bottom, away from the falls, on the rocks in the river.”
“I want to go to a proper school, not a Montessori school,” she says, after a few moments of quiet.
“You’ll be five soon and then you can go to a proper school, although in those parts it might be a mixed school.”
“What is a mixed school?” Loku Duwa asks.
“Both girls and boys, not separate like our schools now,” my son tells her.
“Chee! I don’t want to go to school with boys!” Loku Duwa says.
“I don’t want to go to school with girls either!” Loku Putha adds, as if he means only one girl and that would be his own sister.
I laugh. “It is not so bad. If there is a private convent, I will try to get you girls there, but if not, you will be fine. When we get to my aunt’s house, I will enroll you in school with her daughter’s children, your second cousins.” I can share these details with them now, of relatives I had rarely mentioned before, wanting more than anything to protect them from the misery of knowing there were options we could not follow, people we could be with, trapped as we were by our reliance on their untrustworthy father. But no longer. Now, we are free.
“How old are they?” my son asks.
“She has three sons and a daughter. The oldest is thirteen; that’s the girl. The boys must be nine, seven, and five.”
Chooti Duwa claps her hands. “One for me!”
“He’ll want to run away from you. You’re such a pest,” her sister says, but she’s smiling and I can tell she is happy to hear there will be “one for her” as well, and an older sister at that. They notice my amusement, and their own grins broaden until I can see their teeth, crookedly perfect. My little one’s smile is particularly childish, with two early gaps, which her first permanent teeth are beginning to fill.
My children, who have never been anywhere beyond our town, are excited by everything, even the long stretches of paddy on either side of the train as we approach and pass Ambepussa. When night falls, they talk loudly about the patches of forest, thrilled by the way the clumps of trees look dangerous in the dark. We are fortunate enough that I am able to show them Bible Rock and even a glimpse of Sri Pāda, both of which appear and disappear from our view like mirages in the moonlight. I consider these to be signs of blessing and bring my palms together as we pass.
I put off dinner for as long as they can stand it, hoping that sleep will follow soon after. When I finally relent, I am slightly embarrassed that our food smells so good that several passengers glance over at us. Still, I am glad we have it…, that the plaintain leaves have kept it from spoiling, and that we did not have to purchase buth packets from the Colombo railway station. I have never bought cooked rice from the Muslim stores, although, on occasion, to demonstrate his distaste for anything associated with me, my husband has returned home with a single packet of biryani rice and curries for himself and my mouth has watered at the fragrance. The children eat with haste and enjoyment; it is something to do, I suppose, eat, on a journey whose length I can only guess at, having learned early to think of trips such as these in terms of time, not distance. These days, even that measurement is unreliable. Timetables are for us, but it is fate that decides. Electrical outages, skipped tracks, derailments, delays—that is what we are trained to expect under our present government, nothing too bad, just enough of everything inconvenient to small people like us, people without power and wealth. Still, watching my children, their contentment, I am convinced that our journey is blessed.
I wish I had added some washed green chilies and onions to spice my own packet of rice, but I was in too great a hurry to think that far ahead. I eat my food quickly and finish before they do so I can help Chooti Duwa with hers.
“Here, hold your hands out of the train window so I can wash them,” I say when they are done, and each one complies. I pour a little water on each right hand to wash the indul away.
“Amma, can I drink the rest of the thambili now?” Chooti Duwa asks.
“Yes, but not all of it. We still have a whole night to travel.”
The small basket is no longer full. Only the almost-empty drink bottles and a packet of Maliban lemon puffs remain, along with the remnants of unfin
ished wedges of pineapple. It is very late when we get to Gampola, and there is nothing to see but the people inside the train. It is packed, and we have had to squeeze in against one another’s bodies to accommodate each new group that climbs in with the same focus and effort that we ourselves must have displayed at the start of our journey. I try to keep the children from pressing too close to the windowsills, leaning too heavily against the sides. This is a cheaper compartment, and who knows what kind of illness has rested in its corners? The overhead luggage racks are jammed with bags, and ours sits between our feet. I am grateful for our arrangement, my two older ones in front of me, the little one and I across from them; at least we are together, at least we have the window. When people cough or sneeze, I motion with my eyes so the children lean out and breathe in fresher air, giving their lungs a fighting chance against whatever colds and fevers might have climbed aboard.
All along our journey there are points where solid ground seems so far below our carriage that I hold my breath, expecting some kind of punishment. Some divine blow that would put an end to me and my children. But the train passes over them again and again and it is gone, that sensation of guilt and foreboding, and I am glad. At Nawalapitiya, the train sits for what seems like a long time. I hear a rumor, confirmed by a sharp jerk of the train, that they are adding on a pusher for the up-country climb. We are still stopped, but at least the air is cooler now and my children can sleep.
“Can I shut this window a little?” I ask an older woman sitting next to my son. She nods and smiles at me.
“Your children must be cold,” she says. She has gray hair and wears a cheap red sari. There’s a smear of red in her hairline too. I wonder if she is returning from visiting relatives in Colombo or if she is on her way to visit family on the tea estates. The tea estates are full of Tamil tea pluckers, my mother had once told me, something in her voice conveying a criticism of them, and they often send their children to work as servants, she had murmured, which was what had prejudiced me, too, toward these people. But this woman looks decent. I can’t picture her sending a child to slave at some house far away. Maybe my mother did not know all there was to know about these parts. She had grown up in a good home, sheltered from the world; how could she have picked up facts like that? But I don’t want to think less of my mother, so I shake the thought and smile at the woman.
